WPT Legends of Poker

I got to watch a bit of the final day (before the final six tomorrow) action of the World Poker Tour Legends of Poker event at the Bicycle Club casino in Bell Gardens, California.

I wasn't there to play--at least not to play in the $5000 event--more as moral support for my significant other (SS) who was participating in the Ladie's Poker Party (first place would win a spot on the WPT Ladies Invitational event which is filming September 1st).

Before she went in to start her tournament we spotted Clonie Gowen and Evelyn Ng milling about and I was almost run over by Shana Hiatt and a small group moving with her (she would also be playing in the ladies event). Access to the final few tables of the WPT main event was suprisingly easy to get and I was able to watch Doyle Brunson and Jennifer Harmon play a few hands from my vantage. I didn't get to see any huge deciding pots or exciting races but I did get to see a lot of pots won without anyone ever showing a hand. Now that's good poker.

Pokerwise I did put in some obligatory time in the 3-6 holdem game and ended up a 10 big bet loser (the deciding hand was when my AA was cracked by 88 on the turn when his third 8 miraculously appeared) after three hours when SS was eliminated during the 5th blind escalation from her tournament when her all in with TT vs another player with 77 ended in tragedy when the person in question hit a 7 on the turn. She did pretty well and felt she was playing well the whole tournament and managed to eliminate Kathy Liebert with her JJ vs KL's 77.

I can definitely see the lure that the WPT has brought to poker. The air of the poker room was charged with excitement and it was pretty neat to be surrounded by celebrities (even if they are "just" poker celebrities). If you get a chance to participate in a WPT event (or even just railbird one for a little while) I highly recommend it.

The Big Blind

Good poker movies are few and far between. Even some of the "good" ones (like 1998's Rounders) get discounted by poker players as inaccurate.

Along comes a poker movie written and directed by an actual poker player and starring actual poker players (including Scotty Nguyen and Jennifer Harmon). What could be better, right?

Well almost, but not quite.

The Big Blind isn't a bad movie--in fact it has several redeeming qualities. Some of the moments in the film are truly humorous and sometimes touching and people who play a lot of poker in brick and mortar cardrooms will quickly recognize many of the personalities (the old lady who repeatedly asks for money to play and is rejected) On the down side, some of the acting is weak, the characters lack depth and the cinematography is average at best. Also a bit on the down side for me is the flashy inclusion of Party Poker bonus codes not just in a flyer attached to the DVD but printed on the DVD itself! So every time you play this movie you can't help but ponder signing up for your very own poker account. While I am not opposed to making affiliate income (http://www.lowlimitholdem.com/ pays its bills with it) there is something to be said for subtlety and whacking an ad on the label of the dvd (which I paid $30 for) isn't subtle.

Yet in some sense this is a real poker movie and you may have read some glowing reviews from the likes of Lou Krieger and others. I believe part of the reason for this is that there are so few good poker movies to watch.

Take Shade, starring Sylvester Stallone, for example. This is a fairly recent movie supposedly about card mechanics and poker which still has the Hollywood cliche about literally betting someone out of a pot (you raise me? I raise you eleventy billion dollars!). The loser who cannot call the bet because they simply do not have enough money walks away wondering to themselves what the hell they were thinking playing a game with rules like that.

Of course real poker doesn't have rules like that. Table stakes (you can only win or lose the money that you have in front of you) prevents it, yet you see the same cliche in movie after movie and television show after television show. Hollywood, read this: 1) it doesn't work that way and 2) it doesn't add real drama because no one would play such a game.

The best poker movie I've seen so far is 1965's The Cincinnati Kid starring Steve McQueen and Edward G. Robinson. Even if the players in this movie do play no limit 5-card stud (not an extremely popular choice nowadays!) it is a great movie with lots of action, tension, and excitement. If you get a chance to rent or own this movie it's well worth it.


Back to The Big Blind, the big question is -- is it worth watching? If you're a poker junkie you'll want to do it just to see Jennifer Harmon and Scotty Nguyen in their brief moments on screen and the real bonus will be the moments of real emotion, humor, and truth that are scattered through this movie. (I'm hopeful David James does a second movie because this first one is more of a teaser as to what he could potentially come up with which really is impressive).

Unfortunately you'll have to shell out the value of a big blind (at least in a 15-30 game) in order to watch this movie because you're very unlikely to find it at your local Blockbuster rental store. Go to http://www.thebigblind.com/ to order it directly.

What's Legal and What's Right

First let me assure you that at some point we're actually going to talk about something that relates to playing Low Limit Holdem, it's just not going to be this entry.

This entry I'm going to talk about the site (www.lowlimitholdem.com) and one of the longest running unchanged entries in it--the starting hand selections.

Back in the day (the day being towards the end of the year in 2000) we listed the Sklansky and Malmuth starting hands (from their book Hold 'em Poker For Advanced Players) to show a contrast between what they suggest for a typical middle limit game and what works for a loose passive game (the no foldem holdem games you find at especially the 2-4 and 3-6 limits in brick and mortar cardrooms). This section of the web site stood as is for a few years and then in December 2003 I received an email from Mason Malmuth, or at least someone impersonating him, demanding that we remove their starting hand selections from the site.

My initial reaction was that this may be a prank of some sort and even if it wasn't I felt that we probably had a right to publish this short excerpt to compare to what we were offering for low limit games. The first thing I did was to ask Mr. Malmuth to give me a call to talk about it. This would scare off most casual pranksters but Mason did in fact phone me and we talked about the situation for about ten minutes.

At the end of the phone call I decided to remove the section in our starting hand selections that listed the S&M starting hands. I didn't do this because I thought I was in legal danger but simply because I respect both of these poker authors and because we got right down to it on the phone and the bottom line is that I told him that although I didn't like the tone of the original email that all he needed to do was ask me to remove them and I would--not for legal reasons but for reasons of respect and acknowledgement of his contribution to the poker world before it was the chic thing to do.

Since I removed them I've received several emails from various people pointing out that the copyright law has the following restriction:

Several categories of material are generally not eligible for federal copyright protection. These include among others:

Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries, or devices, as distinguished from a description, explanation, or illustration

In short that legally I shouldn't feel compelled to keep the S&M starting hand selections off the web site. Legally I don't. But I did make an agreement with one of the great poker writers to keep it off the site so I will.

Really it's irrelevant because if you're serious about playing poker you're at least going to own a copy of the book they wrote that contains these starting hand selections anyhow, right? You can order a copy directly from the publisher at www.twoplustwo.com. Tell them I sent you.

Plagiarism, UltimateBet, and Cheesy Calls

Plagiarism

Recently we've had a problem with people taking the pages from our website and converting them to PDF files and selling them on eBay. We had to go so far as to become a VeRO (Verified Rights Owner) on eBay so that we can request that they take down other people's listings when they are selling these sorts of ebooks.

Today we've gone international and received word that a version of this ebook is being sold on the UK version of eBay. I'm not sure whether I want to laugh or cry! Why would anyone bother to do something like this when they have to know they'll be found out? Of course if anyone knows who is distributing these ebooks for resale we'd definitely like to know. You can email me at kmslogic@lowlimitholdem.com.

UltimateBet

UltimateBet is using a quote from one of our pages on their home page. I actually found out about this on our discussion forums (www.lowlimitholdem.com/smf) and was a little skeptical but there it is. Check out a bit of our site on http://www.ultimatebet.com/.

Cheesy Calls

On a personal note I've been playing a number of tournaments lately (best result last week was 1st of 27 in a $250 buy-in event on Paradise). I've noticed an interesting effect especially when playing tournaments on Paradise poker but also elsewhere and that is that people seem very willing to take crazy risks in the very early stages of these tournaments. I've been knocked out more than once in the last week by getting a big preflop hand (including AA) cracked in the very first round of the tournament when the blinds are $10 and $20 with a $1500 stack.

I will always take this risk with AA to get a chance to have a dominating stack in the middle portion of a tournament however I've improved my tournament results quite a bit by avoiding these sorts of situations entirely until the blinds have increased 3 or 4 times. Yes, its nice to have a bigger stack when going into the middle section, however when there is a lot of gambling even being a 4:1 favorite will catch up to you especially in huge preflop multiway pots. By essentially sitting out the first 20 minutes of a Paradise tournament I can avoid a big percentage of this preflop gambling. Give it a try!

On Full Tilt

Take Chris Ferguson, Howard Lederer, Phil Ivy, Erik Seidel, John Juanda, Erick Lindgren, Andy Bloch, Phil Gordon and Clonie Gowen and add an innovative and fun poker client and you've got Full Tilt Poker (Full Tilt). In the last few days they've opened the doors for real money play and each of these pros will be playing a minimum of 10 hours a week there so if you want to sit down with the best and win (or lose of that matter) you can do it now.

It's worth a visit just to check out the fun and humorous avatars they have and the clean user inteface of the clients, and each pro that plays there has a custom avatar that looks like a boardwalk caricature of them. Very nice!

Good luck to them all!

Low Limit No Limit Holdem

The big online game to play right now is no limit ring games which have spawned strategy sites like http://www.flopturnriver.com/ (a good place to visit if you want to play in these games). This is an exciting game with some very good profit potential if you are a good no limit player. Of course it's not so easy to become a good no limit player!

Right now what I see online are three types of people playing this game. First are the gamblers... instead of signing up for InterCasino and playing blackjack they want to gamble against other players. You'll see them throwing money around like crazy and playing an extremely aggressive variety of no limit poker. Next we have the newbies (no offense to them at all--we all were newbies at one point) who saw no limit play on TV most likely (maybe the WSOP or WPT or even Celebrity Poker). These people of course make a lot of mistakes because there's a big difference between playing a no limit game with $1-$2 blinds and playing at the final table of the WSOP. It's not uncommon for them to make big preflop moves on very marginal hands like AJ/55 that really want to see a flop. The last group are the experienced no limit players who are feeding off the first two groups.

These are just observations. I am not a good no limit player (although I can hold my own and have won a few small tournaments). It takes a lot of skills to play no limit because the mistakes are so costly. It also has the potential to be very profitable in the short run as people flock to these tables. There is a problem, though, and that is that the skilled players beat the weak players much faster in no limit and pot limit games than in any other sort of poker. This means that the supply of money into the games will eventually dry up (as they've dried up in the past at the brick and mortar cardrooms except in some special circumstances and except for now that the game has gotten so much new blood mainly from the WPT program on the Travel Channel).

Another thing to keep in mind: Ring no limit play is much different than tournament no limit play. In ring game you're looking to get involved in one or two big pots a night. In a tournament you aren't able to do that because of escalating blinds and have to start making moves. Hands like AK which can usually be put all-in in the later stages of a tournament are preflop suicide in a ring game.

So should you play this flavor of holdem? Well you can if you can build the right skills quickly there is still time to make some money before the money dries up. And when the money does dry up you can come back to limit holdem which will remain constantly popular among poker players of all skills precisely because sometimes the bad player can make a killing.

Farewell Andy Glazer

On the Fourth of July, Andy Glazer died. The news of his death was first reported on the rec.gambling.poker newsgroup and poker players, being the skeptics that they are, thought it was a hoax. It wasn't. For myself it was like a punch in the stomach. As if a friend or family member had died even though I have never met him.

Andy contributed a lot to the poker community through his writings. He reported the big events and he wrote about strategy with a clarity few poker writers can match. He also read like a person--like someone you knew and had a beer with from time to time. He had humility and dignity and he will be greatly missed.

So It Begins

In addition to the message forum at www.lowlimitforum.com, we are creating this blog to provide some dynamic content for our visitors.

This is the first post.